Adrienne Rich will be the guest reader
at the 2008 Jean Burden Poetry Reading. The event will
take place on Wednesday, April 2, 2008 at 6:30pm in the
Golden Eagle Ballroom.

Since
receiving the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1951 (from judge
W.H. Auden), at the age of 21, Adrienne Rich has not
stopped writing in her distinct voice, with strength and
conviction.

photo
credit: Lilian Kemp

Rich has said that her poetry seeks to create
a dialectical relationship between "the personal, or
lyric voice, and the so-called political Â really, the
voice of the individual speaking not just to herself, or
to a beloved friend, but to and from a collective, a
social realm."

"Adrienne RichÂs
poems, volume after volume, have been the makings of one
of the authentic, unpredictable, urgent, essential voices
of our time. All
of her life she has been in love with the hope of telling
the utter truth, and her command of language from the
first has been startlingly powerful."

---W.
S. Merwin

Her poetry and prose are taught in
literature, creative writing, and gender and gay studies
courses across the country and abroad. Her National Book CriticsÂ Circle Award citation
explains: "Rich has captured with subversive wit,
compassion, precision, supple poetics, toughness and yes,
opposition and resistance, what life has been like in the
opening years of a new century. How weÂve been under siege in insidious ways at
home while waging war abroad. Rich writes of disruption, dislocation,
disconnection. But
she is also ravishingly lyrical, inventive, philosophical,
sensual. She
makes things whole again."

Adrienne Rich is the recipient of the 1999 Lannan Foundation
Lifetime Achievement Award. She has also been distinguished by an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize,
the Common Wealth Award in Literature, the National Book Award, the 1996
Tanning Award for Mastery in the Art of Poetry, and the MacArthur Fellowship.
In 2003, Adrienne Rich was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry.

She is the
author of more than sixteen volumes of poetry, including, Diving
into the Wreck, The Dream of a Common
Language, The Fact of a Doorframe:
Selected Poems 1950-2001, An Atlas of
the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991, Collected
Early Poems: 1950-1970, Dark Fields
of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995, Midnight
Salvage, Fox, and The
School Among The Ruins, as well as the prose book
Of Woman Born. She has also authored five books of non-fiction prose,
including Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution and What
is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (2003). Her most recent
book of essays is entitled Arts of the
Possible: Essays & Conversations. She edited Muriel RukeyserÂs
Selected Poems for the Library of America (2004) and has published essays on
the letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, on June Jordan and James
Baldwin, and a preface to Manifesto:
Three Classic Essays On How to Change the World (Ocean Press, Australia, 2005). Her collection, The School Among the Ruins, was honored with the National Book
Critics Circle Award and was chosen as one of Library JournalÂs Best Poetry picks of 2004. It was also selected to receive the 2006 San Francisco Poetry Center
Book Award (judge, Mark McMorris).

In
2006, Adrienne Rich was awarded the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to
American Letters by the National Book Foundation. The judges articulated this
distinction as follows: "Adrienne RichÂ in
recognition of her incomparable influence and achievement as a poet and
nonfiction writer. For more than fifty years, her eloquent and visionary
writings have shaped the world of poetry as well as feminist and political
thought." Her essay on "Poetry and Commitment" was published by Norton in spring 2007, in a small
book with Mark DotyÂs introduction at the National Book Foundation event. Adrienne RichÂs new book of poems is Telephone
Ringing in the Labyrinth (October 2007).